A Beginners Guide To Google Analytics

You want your website to get noticed, but, without reliable data, you simply don’t know how well your online presence is performing. Fortunately, there are tools that can help. Coming from the biggest search engine of them all, Google Analytics is one of the most powerful analytic tools for the web out there.

At its most basic, Google Analytics generates statistics about your website’s traffic, measuring sales and conversions and giving you insights into how visitors use and respond to your site. This information can then be used to get you more from your website through modifying your site and your marketing activities to make it work harder.

There is the perception that this means wading through a sea of incomprehensible statistics, but that isn’t the case at all. Google Analytics presents all of this data in an easily digestible format.

Five ways Google Analytics can help your improve your website

Find out where your visitors come from and what they do as a result of visiting your site

Discover which marketing tactics are most effective (and what isn’t working)

Identify which customers spend most

Pinpoint the most effective webpages

Measure the success of online campaigns

The practical uses of Google Analytics become immediately apparent if you sell via your website. Putting the tool to work to segment your audience and improve your marketing campaigns should inevitably result in increases in sales and conversions. But even if your website simply functions as an informational site, regularly reviewing visitor stats can help you discover which pages get your message across best.

Getting Started

Once you’ve set up an account, you’ll need to get it working for your website. To do this, you simply copy the JavaScript code from Analytics and paste it before the closing </head> tag in your page or template. And that’s really all there is to it! Now, you’re able to see information about your visitors, how they reach your site, what they look for and how well your site is performing.

As you get more competent, you can use Google Analytics to track data across multiple websites, as well as on social networking platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter. You can even analyse traffic on RSS feeds.

For websites with pre-defined templates, where you may not be able edit the page code, there are 3rd-party widgets that can simplify things further.

You’re probably asking yourself, how much does all this cost? The good news is that it’s completely free! So what are you waiting for? Get started with Google Analytics today!